“Judy was also a rescue,” Gary adds until I shoot him an annoyed look. “Just kidding. Judy doesn’t need reassurance. She knows she isn’t safe or loved. Nothing you can tell her can convince her otherwise.” He shrugs. “It’s how she was raised. Literally without hope.” He then mentions my grandparents.

Deirdre shifts in her chair. “We can come back to the dog, and to Judy’s childhood, but let’s focus first on what brought you here.” She looks down at our clipboards but can’t seem to make sense of much of what we’ve written. Except for one phrase that I wrote in block letters, which Number Four now points to and reads out loud:

“It says ‘Separation anxiety.’”

Even though it isn’t funny, why we’re there, we smirk at the joke. The pun of my inability to separate from the dog and our inability to separate from the marriage—and Gary’s actual acute clinical anxiety—is suddenly extremely funny. Every time we see a new therapist, our effort is a spectacular failure. We’ve never found one with a sense of humor, and Deirdre’s obvious lack of one now on the clipboard test proves that today will be no exception.

We will leave early.

“So you need to work out custody and visitation?” she asks.

“Not exactly,” I say. “We’re having some financial challenges, so we’re still living in the same house. In separate rooms.”

Deirdre nods, scribbling furiously. “Kind of like double-nesting—when divorced parents each get an apartment and come back and forth to the family home instead of uprooting the kids.”

“What Judy isn’t explicitly saying is that we’re broke so we can’t afford to split up. What Judy also isn’t saying is that one of the reasons we separated is because we never had sex anymore.”

I roll my eyes. “I wouldn’t say ‘never.’ I’d say rarely.”

He rolls his eyes. “I’d say extremely rarely.” He looks at Deirdre for help. “Judy used to be really into it, but then she wasn’t anymore. It’s like one day that part of her just shut down.”

He isn’t wrong. Even the Chinese acupuncturist I started seeing when I still thought it was a temporary shutdown lingered ominously after taking my pulses. “You closed for business down there,” she had said, slicing her hand through the air with absolute certainty. “Closed. For. Business.” But the needles didn’t help.

“I’m just stressed-out! And exhausted!”

“Everyone’s stressed-out and exhausted!”

I think about the past decade, see myself trapped in a snow globe’s bubble with Gary’s debilitating anxiety, which has radically curtailed his social life, and ours; the death of both my parents within two years of each other; the intense pressure of being the primary breadwinner—all of it falling down, in a silent snow, around me. The strains on our marriage turned our relationship into a friendship—or, more precisely, a family: full of closeness and kindness and deep love while short-circuiting the sexual connection. Didn’t Freud write about this? And how many articles have I read that say this is the new normal, not to mention my own anecdotal research over the years proving that almost every woman I have ever known since Teddy’s preschool days confessed to me the same lack of interest, the same toll of stress and petty grievances and the cruel diminishing of hormones. Aren’t I just one in a long line of hourglasses turned over, on the other side of time? Aren’t I kind of normal?